We were a bit shocked when we got our coding task. Both coding options were unfamiliar fields for us. We chose the dream-car-website option as our task.
All of us were beginners in web developement. This is our first web project. Apart from two of us who knew basic html and css, we had no idea about how to build the site when we started. On searching the internet we found the php+mysql way for building a website with database.
Some of us were into android developement and has heard about firebase. We decided to use firebase since it provide an easy way to access and update database. But none of us had any idea about javascript. But since we knew C++ ,the language seemed similar in logic. For hosting the website , firebase hosting was used.
We used stackoverflow extensively and so was w3schools and tutorialspoint. Also the well documented firebase guides and API reference helped us in our way.
The car data was fetched from the website carzoom.in and was stored in an excel csv ( http://www.tiny.cc/svcodata ) in google sheets and converted to json using an online converter to upload to the firebase database.
But there was roadblocks. We had to drop some proposed functions of our websites because we were stuck and running out of time. Initially we thought of automatically scraping details of the cars using scrapy and python. But it didnt work out. So we had to manually build our database. Also we proposed a My Account page for our website, but couldnt finish it. We tested the website on only one screen resolution. So on different screens the site looks not as intended. It was too late to update when we became aware of the issue.
Now about our website: We wanted our website to be different. We checked the prominent players and they were almost similar. But we chose a simplistic approach.
We thought about the most important features we consider when choosing a car and came up with 6 important features of a car to look upon. We ignored features like 'Engine horsepower' or 'rear ac vents' which we thought were less important features for a common visitor of our website. Thus we developed 'CheckMate'. Checkmate is the proud assistant we present to our users to help them find their dream car. It is simple and asks only six questions. Checkmate then searches the database and shows the suitable cars to the user.
About the Video Task: We were a bit late to shoot our video. But we were confident we could do it well because we had a video editor in-house. It was our first experience of speaking to a video camera. We enjoyed it a lot.
We heard of Github but didnt used it before. We confess we havent made good use of GitHub in this project. We created an account for our team and all updates were made using the team account. With this challenge ,we got the basics of GitHub and we look forward to use it in our future projects.
Final update: Everything was OK until our firebase hosting showed an error. Fixing of it took some time. But we submitted the links in sv.co on time and now its 25 minutes late when we submit this update in github(Written on 12:25 ,September 15, but deadline was extended..).